Wordorigins.org

tacit

Dave Wilton, Wednesday, January 26, 2011

The adjective tacit is an interesting case study in Early Modern borrowing from Latin because of its origin in legal jargon, a dialectal connection with Scottish English, a remarkable stability in meaning over the centuries, as well as its first citation in the Oxford English Dictionary being from the first English-language dictionary, Cawdrey’s 1604 Table Alphabeticall. The word appears to have been borrowed from Latin by Scottish lawyers, eventually making its way south into England. The connection with legal jargon and Scotland, however, is not obvious from the OED entry and must be teased out through close examination of the citations and by reference to other dictionaries of the era.

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